The Death of Politics

by Peter Wehner

  Orwell’s thoughts on political language merit particular attention. “In our time,” he wrote, “political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.” Political language consists largely of “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” He added, “Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

  One senses in Orwell his frustration with the state of political speech because it often degrades what he considered precious, language; because it warped reality and the true nature of things; and because he understood the enormously high stakes in politics. If we get our politics wrong, Orwell knew, it can lead to misery and suffering, to gulags and concentration camps. “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against totalitarianism,” he said, “and for Democratic Socialism as I understand it.”

  Orwell believed political language matters because politics matter, that the corruption of one leads to the corruption of the other. He believed language was a means to see the truth and to tell the truth. He believed, too, in a moral code, in concepts like justice and objective truth. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command,” Orwell wrote in 1984.

  [Winston Smith’s] heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s center. With the feeling that he was speaking to O’Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote: Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.63

  The challenge of our time is to rediscover our best ends and noblest purposes. We can’t give up on the belief that human beings are rational and reasonable, that evidence and logic matter, and that persuasion is possible. The human condition is such that things are rarely all of one and none of the other, and certainly in this case, the pendulum swings from moments of collective trust and calm reason to collective mistrust, emotivism, and rancor. In the world today there is pacific New Zealand on the one hand, and there is war-torn Syria on the other. In America there was the “era of good feeling” in 1815–25 and the Civil War in the 1860s, the placid 1950s and the raucous, angry late 1960s.

  A lot of different factors—internal and external, domestic and international, economic and social—influence a nation’s political and civic culture. And we all know, deep in our bones, that so does political leadership and rhetoric. We need to stand with men and women in public life who believe, as Lincoln did, that words can be instruments of reason and justice, repair and reconciliation, enlightenment and truth. Who are willing to challenge not just their adversaries but their allies, not just the other political tribe but their own. And who are willing to make a compelling case for deliberative democracy and persuasion.

  “The posturing and pontificating we find in our messy public discourse are neighbors to a genuine democratic good—the practice of persuasion,” writes Yale political science professor Bryan Garsten.

  In addressing our fellow citizens directly, we make an effort to influence them, not with force or threat or cries, but with articulated thoughts that appeal to their distinctly human capacity for judgment. In trying to persuade, we attend to their opinions without leaving behind our own, and so we try somehow to combine ruling and being ruled in the way that democratic politics requires. While neither as powerful nor as ubiquitous as rhetoricians themselves might claim, persuasion is nevertheless a real possibility in democratic life, and it is a possibility that we ought to protect.64

  Indeed it is, and indeed we should. We have to reclaim our language in order to reclaim our politics.

  Chapter 6

  In Praise of Moderation, Compromise, and Civility

  In the 1990s I became a good friend of Joe Klein, who at the time was a columnist for Newsweek. Joe was more liberal than I, though we had similar instincts on several matters. We originally met, in fact, because of our interest in faith-based social programs. Our relationship was characterized by respect, affection, and interests beyond politics. He was delightful company.

  Yet after I joined the Bush White House in 2001, our relationship hit a rough patch, particularly over the Iraq War. He believed I had gone over to the Dark Side; I felt that he was unfair and uncharitable in his critiques of President Bush and our administration. Neither of us was inclined to give ground; each of us was happy to point out the flaws we suddenly saw so clearly in each other.

  Once I left the White House, our antipathy, rather than receding, went public. He wrote for publications attacking me; I was more than willing to write for publications attacking him. It got intense and personal. (A quick Google search will prove my point.) We were both inflamed because of our political differences.

  During our estrangement, I justified my words and actions. “He was the aggressor,” I told myself, “and when you’re in the public arena you have to fight for what you believe and respond to those who attack you.” I had people who agreed with me (and who disagreed with Joe) cheering me on.

  But those who know me the best, like my wife Cindy, also knew that all along there was a part of me that felt like what was happening wasn’t quite right—that this wasn’t the way things ought to be—and eventually things would need to be repaired.

  By the summer of 2015 I felt it was time to explore the possibility of reconnecting. It turned out it was. I reached out to Joe in an email, asking if a meeting was possible. He readily agreed, and we met for breakfast at the Jefferson Hotel in Washington, DC. Joe and I happened to see each other even before we entered the hotel and embraced on the street corner, almost before any words had been spoken between us. Reconciliation was now on track. Political differences had splintered our relationship; it was now being put back together. But it took time.

  You may have experienced your own version of this. Differences with acquaintances and friends can quickly escalate; as a result, relationships can be strained and even reach the breaking point. Time and distance can help repair the breach. Passions cool, the gaps between you and the other person don’t seem quite as wide. The qualities that once drew you to each other come back into focus. Conversations turn to topics deeper and more personal than politics.

  But the restoration of fractured friendships isn’t easy; it doesn’t happen by accident, and politics can complicate things. That’s especially true today, when our differences can seem so vast, and the feelings they stir up so fervent, that they overwhelm everything else. If we don’t figure out a way to restrain these passions—and as this story attests, I find it as hard to achieve as you do—mutual contempt, incivility, and broken politics will be our fate.

  NAVIGATING OUR WAY THROUGH OUR DIFFERENCES

  As you look out at the broken state of our politics, lamenting its tone and shaking your head in disgust at the bickering and lack of cooperation, the mistake you’re likely to make is the same one I can easily fall into: to assume that all would be right with the world if only more people agreed with me, if they saw things just as I see them, if they interpreted things just as I do—and if they don’t, to get irritated at them for their ignorance and inflexibility, their flawed judgment and lack of self-awareness, for not sufficiently loving their country. To believe, in short, that they’re not only wrong but deeply flawed as human beings.

  Here’s the thing, though: the people I’m quick to condemn because they hold different views than I do look at me the same way as I look at them. They believe that if o
nly I thought more like they do, the acrimony and distasteful parts of politics would disappear.

  In a sense, we’re both right. It’s true that if we only set aside our differences—if one side or the other jettisoned its beliefs in the name of agreement—our politics would be less acrimonious and gridlocked. But that hope is a fairy tale. To wish for it is to wish that pigs could fly.

  The more pressing practical problem is not that we have differences, which always exist and will never entirely disappear. Rather, the problem is that we have lost the ability to navigate our way through our differences. In other words, the fact that we disagree on so much is not our main political and social challenge; the failure to find reasonable accommodation in the midst of those differences is.

  The task of politics is to live peaceably with our differences and for people to find appropriate outlets for their views to be heard and represented. A healthy politics has as its goal not a civic nirvana where we all just get along, but a nation with enough sense of unity and common purpose to accept and overcome our differences—and where deep differences do exist, to debate them with words rather than fists or billy clubs or bullets, in ways that are characterized by intellectual rather than physical conflict.

  Responsible citizenship means accepting that differences exist and will continue to exist. The urgent questions we need to wrestle with are these: What do we do about them? How do we live as one nation with deep differences, which aren’t going away anytime soon? The answer: restore the democratic virtues that are necessary for a self-governing nation to thrive.

  Before doing that, however, we have to ask ourselves the same question the American founders asked themselves: What is the proper way to understand human nature? The cure to what ails us depends on getting the diagnosis of the human condition right.

  MEN ARE NOT ANGELS

  At the core of every social, political, and economic system is a picture of human nature, to paraphrase the twentieth-century columnist Walter Lippmann. The presuppositions we begin with—the way in which the picture is developed—determines the lives we lead, the institutions we build, and the civilization we create. They are the foundation stone.

  To simplify things a bit, within political philosophy over the last several centuries, there have been three main currents of thought about the nature of the human person. The first is that humans, while flawed, are perfectible. A second is that we are flawed and permanently so, and should accept and build our society around this rather unpleasant reality. A third view is that although human beings are flawed, we are capable of virtuous acts and self-government—that under the right circumstances, human nature can work to the advantage of the whole.

  The first school included those who, representing the French Enlightenment, believed in the perfectibility of man and the preeminence of scientific rationalism. Their plans were grandiose, utopian, revolutionary, and aimed at “the universal regeneration of mankind” and the creation of a “New Man.”

  Such notions, espoused by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other Enlightenment philosophes, heavily influenced a later generation of thinkers, including socialist theorists like Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and Henri de Saint-Simon. They believed that human nature was easily reshaped. Human nature was considered plastic and malleable, to the point that there was no fixed nature to speak of; it could therefore be molded into anything the architects of a social system imagined.

  The second current of thought, embodied in the writings of seventeenth-century Englishmen Thomas Hobbes (whom we met in chapter 3) and Bernard Mandeville, viewed human nature as more nearly the opposite: inelastic, brittle, and unalterable. And people were, at their core, antisocial beings.

  Hobbes, for example, worried that people were ever in danger of lapsing into a precivilized state, “without a common power to keep them all in awe,” which, in turn, would lead to a hopeless existence, a “state of nature” characterized by “a war of every man, against every man.” To avoid this fate, we must submit to the authority of the state, which he termed the “Leviathan” (a monstrous, multiheaded sea creature mentioned in the Hebrew Bible). In the process, we would gain self-preservation, but it would come at the expense of liberty.

  The third model of human nature is found in the thinking of the American founders. “If men were angels,” wrote James Madison, the so-called father of the Constitution, in Federalist Paper No. 51, “no government would be necessary.” But Madison and the other founders knew men were not and would never become angels.

  They believed instead that human nature was mixed, a combination of virtue and vice, nobility and corruption. People are swayed by both reason and passion, capable of self-government but not to be trusted with absolute power. The founders’ assumption was that within every human heart, let alone among different individuals, were competing and sometimes contradictory moral impulses and currents. (“Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him,” is how the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne put it.)

  Here’s the important point: the American founders believed we needed to create institutions that take into account aspects of human nature—“unfriendly passions,” our tendency to factionalize, and our susceptibility to grievance and demagoguery—and constructively channel them; to “refine and enlarge the public view,” in the words of The Federalist.

  In particular, the founders accepted that deep differences were a given—their own experiences, including the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, underscored just how deep those differences could run—and wanted our political institutions to deal with them in ways that kept the republic from flying apart.

  There are two methods of removing the causes of faction, according to Madison: “The one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.”1

  Since destroying liberty would be a catastrophe and it’s impossible to give every citizen the same opinions, passions, and interests, factions were here to stay. (As a young boy, upon reading Montaigne, Madison wrote, “Our passions are like Torrents which may be diverted, but not obstructed.”2) Our Madisonian system of government—based on checks and balances and separation of powers—was designed to push people toward accommodation. But what’s happening right now is that it is pushing people toward alienation.

  REBALANCING OUR POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS

  Today our political institutions, and particularly Congress, are not working well at all, and the result is that we’re far less able to deal with our differences than in the past.

  One reason for this is that the dominance of the executive branch (the presidency), combined with the hollowing out of the legislative branch (Congress), leaves many people feeling as if they’re shut out of the process.3 Citizens of every political persuasion need to feel their views are being represented, particularly in a political environment in which there is so little trust. The political scientist Greg Weiner argues that presidential government exacerbates the problem of people feeling there’s a lack of fair play in our politics because executive power is concentrated in a single person. He compares Congress to a 42-megapixel camera in that, because it consists of 535 people, Congress can register the full range of views among the people. The president, on the other hand, is more like a single pixel: you’re either in or you’re out. Republicans had no chance of their views being represented in the Obama administration, for example, and that’s a problem from the perspective of fair play if the presidency dominates the system, as it now does. That’s true of Democrats in the Trump administration. By contrast, anyone in the mainstream has a reasonable chance of their views being taken into account in Congress.

  Right now our politics is dominated by the presidency, which is seen as the be-all and end-all of American politics.4 A rebalancing between the executive and legislative branches is therefore needed. This is an argument for Congress to revita
lize itself, to act as the first branch of government, and in the words of the government scholar Philip Wallach, “to understand its own proper purposes again.” According to Wallach:

  If the political developments of the last few years have taught us nothing else, they have made one thing amply clear: America is a deeply divided nation, whose citizens sometimes seem to inhabit different moral universes. This makes it all the more important that we rely on a system of government that allows provisional cooperation between seemingly opposed factions. In our system, that means giving a prominent place to Congress.5

  What that entails in practical terms includes structural reforms in Congress intended to compel more traditional legislative work and bargaining—for example, breaking up the budget process into smaller parts, in order to give Congress a chance to do more practical legislating in an ongoing way; combining authorizing and appropriating, which would enable members to exercise more authority over their domain and better tie the budget process to policy making; and allowing committees control of floor time, which would enable much more legislation to actually get to a vote.

  It should involve giving Congress a greater role in oversight of executive and regulatory agencies and reforming campaign finance to reverse some of the errors of the past four decades, such as the strict limits on donations to parties that have empowered outside groups intent on activating the most polarized activists. We should also re-empower the parties as funders and take steps to liberate individual members to function as legislators representing their districts. When they work, the parties encourage the formation of broad coalitions, while individual members forced to become full-time fundraisers are more driven to please narrow interest groups. These kinds of reforms wouldn’t exactly prevent confrontation or conflict in Washington. Rather, they would harness it to drive accommodation and give the people involved some incentives to build coalitions.